Lochner, Michael Friedrich and Johann Heinrich | The catalogue of the celebrated Besler natural history collection

Lochner, Michael Friedrich and Johann Heinrich

Rariora Musei Besleriani quae olim Basilius et Michael Rupertus Besleri collegerunt... Nuremberg: [no publisher], 1750

Small folio (300 x 185 mm). Title printed in red and black, engraved portrait of J. H. Lochner, 40 double-page engraved plates; text leaves toned and spotted, plate 13 split at fold. Contemporary mottled calf; rubbed.

First edition of the catalogue of the celebrated Besler natural history collection, begun by the Nuremberg apothecary Basil Besler (d. 1629) and expanded by his nephew Michael Rupert Besler (d. 1661). Compiled by the physician and botanist Michael Friedrich Lochner with commentary by Johann Heinrich Lochner, the work documents one of the most important seventeenth-century cabinets of natural curiosities. The finely executed double-page engravings record an array of natural specimens, from minerals and fossils to botanical and zoological curiosities. Twenty-four of the plates first appeared in Besler’s Gazophylacium (1642).

REFERENCES

Nissen ZBI 348; Pritzel 747; Wilson, Mineral Collecting, p. 205

PROVENANCE

The Earl of Macclesfield (bookplate; Sotheby’s London, 16 March 2004, lot 64)